Jharkhand’s left-arm spinner Anukul Roy may not get a chance to showcase his skills in this year’s IPL for Mumbai Indians (MI), but he certainly hogged the limelight by taking a stunning catch to dismiss Rajasthan Royals’ (RR) Mahipal Lomror in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday (October 6).
Roy was on the ground as a substitute fielder when Lomror got a leading edge off Rahul Chahar’s bowling in the 9th over.
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The ball was reaching somewhere near mid-off but that was no man’s land. However, Anukul, who was stationed at short cover, ran back and kept his eyes on the ball. As the ball was going further and further away, he took a full-length dive and completed the grab to end Lomror’s innings on 11.
After the game, Chahar interacted with the 21-year-old Anukul and asked him about the special catch.
“The only thing on my mind, when I saw the ball on its path, was for me to reach the ball before the ball reached the ground. The catch would’ve been easier if I reached as much close to the ball as I had desired to, however, it wasn’t so and in the end, I had to take the dive to secure the catch. Feels really good to have bagged that catch, really good to have done something for the Mumbai Indians team,” Roy said in a video posted by IPL on Twitter.
“Kieron Pollard is someone who has been taking these brilliant catches all the time and honestly we get to learn a from him during training. Pollard always gives us his humble two cents about fielding. He took another brilliant catch today [the one to dismiss Buttler] and there’s a lot to learn from these seniors. Besides, Ishan [Kishan] too bagged an amazing one the other day,” he added.
Coming to the match, Mumbai Indians thrashed the Royals by 57 runs and claimed the top position on the points table.
Opting to bat first, the defending champions piled up 193/4 in 20 overs on the back of Suryakumar Yadav’s unbeaten 79 off 47 balls (11 fours and 2 sixes). Hardik Pandya (30* off 19 balls) and skipper Rohit Sharma (35 off 23 balls) also made valuable contributions with the bat.
Defending the total, MI bundled out RR for 136 in 18.1 overs, with the pace troika of Jasprit Bumrah (4-20), Trent Boult (2-26) and James Pattinson (2-19) doing the bulk of the damage. It was an awful batting performance from Rajasthan as none of the batsmen except for Jos Buttler (70 off 44 balls) managed to cross the 30-run mark.
